Content Strategies To Improve Your SEO

Becoming an expert or a respected source for specific types of content is one of the best ways to improve your search ranking. Search engines view sites that have multiple pages of in-depth coverage on a particular topic as more valuable because they present users with a greater chance of finding the information that they’re looking for.

Search engines look for “content clusters” on websites to determine their relevance to a specific search query. Sites that have lots of quality content focused on a single subject are likely to rank higher. For sites covering multiple topics, it’s important to organize based on themes, main subjects, or terms, otherwise known as “siloing,” to help increase your ranking. Organizing related elements of your website into “silos” of information helps search engines recognize related content, and can be easily done in your main navigation.

Another popular (and often successful) strategy is creating content around a keyword or keyword phrase that has shown high levels of engagement on your site. If you know that a certain keyword draws a lot of traffic to your site, then you should focus your efforts on creating more content around that term. This will help you reinforce your relevance and boost your search ranking for that particular term. This should hopefully lead to more traffic and monetization opportunities for your efforts.

Blogging & Content Marketing

Having a blog is a necessity for content marketing. If you want to be taken seriously in the digital marketing space, you have to maintain a blog and keep your followers coming back to your site for more. This is an obvious truth for online publishers and bloggers, but many big brands neglect their blogs or lack them altogether.

According to a 2013 HubSpot report, 79% of companies with a blog experienced a positive ROI for inbound marketing, compared to just 20% of companies without a blog. Clearly there’s a big discrepancy between those numbers that serves as an obvious indicator of the importance of a blog.

In 2014, a brand’s blog should be the front line of their content marketing strategy. It’s their own customizable domain to share relevant information, tell their story, and provide followers with great branded content. Essentially, a business’s blog is where the content marketing journey starts.

As the critical foundation for your content marketing endeavors, you should take the time to focus on the design and layout of your blog and ensure that all of the existing content is of the highest quality possible. Your blog will serve as the single most important place for your content strategy, and as such, it should provide an unbeatable user experience.

While having a great blog of your own will be a cornerstone of your content marketing strategy, it doesn't mean that you have to limit yourself to creating and sharing information solely on your blog. In fact, it’s equally important to try and contribute to other related sites in order to get your brand and your message in front of your target audience.

Having your brand appear on neutral publications will help build your fan base and legitimize your business while also helping to establish your reputation as an expert in your niche. When your followers and potential customers recognize your brand on other sites, it helps them build trust and reinforces your company’s relationship with them as consumers. On the other hand, guest blogging serves as a great opportunity to evangelize your company to new audience members and gives you a new platform to further share your story.

Blogging For Content Marketing

Running your own blog requires a lot of time, effort, and resources. As such, you should look at your blog as an investment. One of the best ways to ensure that you get a return on your investment is to focus on optimizing your blog and your content for search. Ultimately, your search ranking will help you generate more organic traffic, reach a larger audience, and bring in extra revenue.

So what are some tips for getting your content noticed by search engines?

First, you should spend a lot of time crafting the headlines of your articles. When it comes to content marketing, having a catchy headline is more than half the battle. In fact, most content creators spend more time coming up with headlines than they do on the body of content itself—it’s that important!

Here are a few guidelines to help you write better headlines:

Be Concise—Internet users want to be able to gather as much information with as little effort and in as short amount of time as possible. Thus, your headlines need to be short and to the point. Typically, headlines with 8 words or less perform best.

Use Numbers—Starting your headline with a number tells readers exactly what they can expect to find inside and tends to attract more attention as a result. Titles such as “10 Expert SEO Tips” or “5 Unbelievable Marketing Videos” will garner more clicks and help your content be recognized by search engines.

Offer Benefits—Use words that promise some sort of benefit to your readers. For example, the phrase “How to” typically gets a great response because it quickly indicates to your readers that they can learn something new from your piece.

Optimize for Search—This may seem like a no-brainer, but you should try to include your keyword or keyword phrase in your headline. Search engines will look at the title of your article to determine its relevance to a search query, so it’s important that you include the term or subject of your article in the title. Use tools to learn what people are searching for and find a way to include that specific term in your headline.

Tease Your Readers—Titles that are mysterious or play to the curiosity of your audience will also perform well. The key to this type of headline is to write something short that hints at what makes the article helpful, controversial, interesting, or funny. Don’t give all of the information of your article away in the title; rather, make readers click to find out.

Writing catchy headlines plays a huge part in the success of your content strategy, but so does your subject matter. Real content marketing success is the result of combining a great topic with high quality content, a great headline, and then getting creative with how you share it with your audience.

Try using these guidelines for choosing great subject matter and getting the most out of each and every post:

Choose Timeless Topics—Just like there are timeless songs that we all know and love regardless of their age, there are timeless topics that no matter what year it is, people will still be interested in them. Some great examples are celebrities, technology, food, and entertainment. Finding ways to tie timeless elements into your articles will help extend their shelf life and their relevance to your readers over time.

Expand On Your Previous Posts—A great way to keep your momentum moving forward is to study your previous posts, find out which ones performed best, and then build on those topics. This is an effective strategy for targeting your audience and nurturing a new content cluster, which search engines will view as being authoritative.

Update Older Posts—You don’t always have to create and share brand-new content. Extend the life of your existing posts by updating the most popular posts from your archives. Take a look at your analytics, find some posts that have performed well in the past, and give them a modern makeover. Don’t rewrite your posts, as that could have damaging effects on your SEO. Simply give them a bit of an update so that they are relevant to your new audience members.

Stay On Top Of Trends—Blog posts are inherently short-lived and generally news-y, which is why it’s a great idea to stay atop trends and cover topics in your niche that are popular at the moment. These types of posts can be quickly created and shared, and result in quick and easy spikes in traffic, which will boost your search ranking. As public interest grows in a trending topic, there’s often a short period of time where marketers can create related content and ride the wave of popularity. You can expand the reach of your brand by sharing timely posts or developing entire campaigns around trending topics.

Your blog gives you total control over your brand’s image and should act as the foundation for all of your content marketing efforts. Your brand identity and voice should be strongest on your blog because after all, it’s your home turf. The most important thing to remember is that this is where your content marketing strategy will start, so you need to take the time to optimize it, both in terms of design and content. Understanding who your audience is and what they’re interested is a big part of creating a blog and content that will be successful.
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Understanding & Explaining A Realistic SEO Timeline

How long should it take to see SEO results? Columnist Stephan Spencer says there's no simple answer to this question, but explains some of the factors which may impact an SEO timeline.

Is your site is in deep water in the search engines? Perhaps you got hit with a manual penalty. Perhaps competition is simply outperforming you in results and in sales. Maybe you’re the consultant or in-house SEO who has been assigned to a tough case….

For site owners or marketing managers, it’s often difficult to understand why your rankings or conversion rates are not improving – are perhaps even declining – after implementing huge site changes at the advice of your SEO practitioner. If you’re the SEO in that situation, you might have a tough time explaining exactly why you can’t just “SEO it faster.”

Now, it could be that your strategy isn’t working; however, it’s more likely that there is simply a disconnect between the SEO practitioner and the rest of the team about the nature of a “realistic SEO timeline.” How do we solve the information gap?

Here are some ideas that are great for starting the discussion:

SEO Is Site Fitness

Optimize Worldwide’s Matt Morgan wrote a great article back in May comparing SEO to taking antibiotics. While this is a fine analogy, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

SEO is about fixing current problems as much as it is about preventative measures and continual improvement. Once your “treatment” of short-term SEO tasks is done, your site should never stop practicing SEO.

Perhaps a better analogy would be to say that SEO works similarly to a fitness routine. If you start skipping your routine — or stop doing it all together — you’re not going to achieve or maintain optimal results.

Of course, before starting that fitness routine, it is always important to check in with your doctor, who will make recommendations as to what can be feasibly done without damaging your body. This is the SEO’s first job: looking at your site to diagnose what problems are going on, and providing guidance on how you can build strong, reputable authority and rankings over time.

Going too fast and expecting extreme results will often end up resulting in some sort of “over correction” that could damage your site further, just like an extreme diet can work in the short term, but ultimately put you right back where you started — or worse, do damage to your body.

SEO Is Complex And Requires Long-Term Thinking

A lot of the technical side of SEO is troubleshooting. The fact is, it isn’t always evident why your rankings are fluctuating. For example, is it possible that an SEO tactic used in the past is now being recognized as spam, meaning that its value has been discounted within Google’s ranking algorithm. That could lead to a huge drop in rankings, and an SEO consultant’s efforts that have been making slow, positive progress might be obscured or blamed for this.

It’s important to understand that there are many variables going on with your SEO. The consultant or in-house SEO is working with all the SEO, design, code, etc., decisions made in the long past, the recent past, the present, and the future. That’s why it is incredibly important to start out an SEO relationship with an audit of the site. This is going to uncover those problems that wouldn’t normally show up on your radar screen and expose the damage that they may be doing to your site.

Once you have a solid foundation, develop an action plan to move forward in bolstering your site’s reputation and reach. Sometimes, when fixing a site from some major foul play, you’ll see worse results before you see eventual and steady improvement.

For example, in a recent conversation with forensic SEO consultant Alan Bleiweiss, he described to me a case with one of his clients which illustrates the need to take the long view on SEO projects.

Alan related to me:

I did the audit in January of 2013, and the client began implementing changes immediately. The organic traffic continued to slide through July 2013, and then only began to slowly come back at that point. As you can see, from that point forward, it was a bump up, decline, bump up, decline process repeatedly until finally, a year later, it’s breaking through.

This site was a combination of issues across various algorithms, mostly Panda. That’s the most difficult reality – Panda has continued over the past couple years to mostly get stricter, with some “easing” thrown in along the way. That makes it very difficult for a site to reach sustainability.

Another critical consideration is that work can’t be done once and left. These sites need ongoing applied pressure of stronger quality signals on-site as well as brand authority and trust reinforcement.

You can see from the graph of the web traffic that this site actually required major changes which, with the additional complication of algorithm changes by Google, actually caused organic traffic to drop for a significant period of time.

However, by taking the long view, being patient, and doing all the right things to create sustainable SEO success, the traffic has rebounded and indeed surpassed previous levels. Had Alan not prepared the client for the fact that this may likely be the case, he and the internal team members responsible for SEO could well have faced some very difficult conversations with the management team.

SEO Requires A Team Effort

There are a myriad of factors that impact SEO success — and many are dependent upon cooperation from other teams or departments.

With larger clients, we’re often looking at tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands, or millions) of website pages and large, sometimes geographically distributed, teams to work with. There’s also the bureaucracy of getting changes approved and enacted. A lot of the time can be spent waiting in the wings on obtaining approval, deciding on preferred courses of action, or simply getting SEO work into the site development queue.

That’s why the cooperation of other teams — especially the IT department and the social media team – is crucial to SEO success. The SEO is managing not just a bunch of keywords, but an entire movement for the direction of your site. Don’t underestimate the amount of work this takes, especially when factoring in the time needed to get buy-in from these other departments or executives.

Timing Is Often A Game Of Chance

An effective SEO tactic used to be putting up 50 new blog content pieces and promoting the heck out of them in hopes that a small number would be seen by a lot of people, and perhaps earn social shares and link authority for the site.

The thing is, virality is incredibly hard to predict, even by the experts. It is often about placing content in the right place at the right time; however, that right moment can happen at any moment.

You can make an effort to predict what content your audience will want by using seasonality (basketball-related content during March Madness, etc.), leveraging a current event (this gets tricky, since if it is done too late, it is passé), or simply trying to put out awesome content and ideas that people want to share, and hoping it strikes a chord.

ROI Gets Complicated

Google’s Hummingbird algorithm and the loss of keyword referral data (“not provided”) have made things a heck of a lot harder for SEOs aiming to measure precise ROI of their actions.

No longer is it an option to measure the exact amount of traffic a singular keyword is getting you. Furthermore, Hummingbird makes it so you can’t always directly control which variations of a word your site will rank for. Sometimes, this can even direct irrelevant traffic to your site.

Instead, look for KPIs that add more value to your overall goals. Is the ultimate goal of your SEO overhaul to receive more positive online press? Is it to facilitate brand loyalty? Is it to improve conversion rates? What metrics have value is ultimately determined by your business’ specific goals; useful info for one site could be utterly unhelpful for another.

One metric that I always recommend is “task completion” – this cuts to the core of understanding why people use your site, which helps inform strategies for increasing conversions. This methodology recognizes that not everyone is going to come to your site to buy — that’s just not the way it works. Instead, it asks, “Did the visitor complete what (s)he set out to do on the site?”

For example, some users will use the site to research a type of product for interest in a purchase later down the road. To help them receive the best possible experience, have a great and clean review system with clear ratings that you keep free of spam, and use in-depth, original content for your product descriptions. You could even create a forum where users ask questions, then keep a log of these questions and flesh out pages on the site by answering them. Track the time a user spends on the product page or on pages providing more in-depth info on the product.

It may be useful to collect some data on task completion rates in the audit portion of your SEO plan. To do so, set up a short survey that asks just a yes or no question, such as “did you complete what you wanted to get done?”, “are you satisfied with your visit?” or even a short multiple choice question that asks users if they are visiting for research, for entertainment, or to buy. You can use this metric later to review the efficacy of the SEO plan in creating a better customer experience.

What This Means When You’re Hiring/Working With An SEO

• Never trust an SEO professional who claims to guarantee a number #1 spot in 6 months or less. Often times, the benefits of a well-executed SEO strategy won’t manifest themselves for at least a year, especially when the website being optimized has a lot of issues. Tactics which might get your rankings to spike in the short term can come back to haunt you in the long term.
• Ask for a timeline of expectations at the beginning, and then another timeline after the audit is done.
• Look for someone who, instead of focusing on rankings, focuses on your business goals. Rather than rankings, look for growth in KPIs such as organic traffic, sales, tasks completed, etc.
• As with your own personal fitness, often it is best to focus on small, achievable goals that are right in front of you. Doing so allows progress to happen, less inhibited by the constant worry of where you are in comparison to the mountain of work ahead of you. Instead of trying to succeed at SEO with a single herculean effort, you can create something great, measure its performance, and then create another starting point from which to continue improving.
• Ask them not what is going to give the fastest results, but what will lead to the results that can be sustained over time.
• Try a timeline that is segmented into actions: 2-4 weeks for a comprehensive site audit, 1-2 months for technical changes, 2 months for content revamp, 3-4 months for link acquisition efforts, etc.
• Ask for reports that explain clearly what is being done and how this will improve your overall growth; de-emphasize pure ranking metrics.

This article should not be seen as validating poorly-done SEO that does not show you the fastest possible results. There are some situations in which great SEO can indeed show very fast results – such as eliminating hidden spammy links from hackers, fixing critical crawling or site architecture issues, or manual penalty recovery.

What you should take from this article is that before beginning any SEO efforts, you should take time to assess the situation, plan both short- and long term-strategies, approach SEO as an ongoing process, and communicate realistic goals and timelines for improvement to the larger team and executives.

Many SEO efforts fail due to unrealistic expectations about the time and investment required. Don’t let yours be one of them

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